Let’s Get Paranoid

Global production company Paranoid creates innovative music vids and spots

By Simon Wakelin

This Article Features Photo Zoom

In the modern world of commercials, music videos and independent film, digital is at the heart of just about everything. HDVideoPro chatted with global production company Paranoid about their use of HD. Cients include Nike, Ray-Ban, Mercedes-Benz, Converse, IKEA and Duracell, and their impressive roster also shoots music videos and independent features. Paranoid's CEO Claude Letessier and two of its brightest talents—directors Olivier Babinet and Wilfrid Brimo—took time to discuss their use of digital, the expectations of the audience and the challenge of keeping ideas fresh in the competitive world of commercial production.

Paranoid's Olivier Babinet has directed several successful commercials, including a spot for natural gas company Aardgas, which takes place inside a house where everything is knitted over in wool to signify the warmth provided by natural gas. Some of Paranoid's long list of clients includes Nike, Ray-Ban, Mercedes-Benz, Converse, Duracell and many others. Paranoid also produces music videos and indie features.

Letessier opened his production company Paranoid in France in 2003 after a successful career creating and composing sounds and sound design in Hollywood for some of the biggest directors in the business, including Steven Spielberg, Mark Pellington, Tarsem, Wong Kar-wai and Michael Bay. Letessier also joined longtime friend Hans Zimmer in 1996 to create a sound design division at Media Ventures in Santa Monica, going on to collaborate with him on numerous projects. He also worked with director Terrence Malick on The Thin Red Line as a sound designer and an ethnomusicologist.

After some initial success in France, Paranoid opened offices in Los Angeles to service the American market and then in São Paulo—a division noted as the first Brazilian commercial film production house offering a roster of internationally recognized directors and producers. What makes Paranoid stand out from the crowd is not only its business savvy and breathtaking creativity, but also the company's fresh approach to filmmaking that eschews regular run-of-the-mill tactics.

"Even the most talented director needs a sharp and edgy production team to make good work," outlines Letessier on company policy. "Our directors work globally so they need to be culturally connected and need to feel supported on every level. All of the work is enhanced because of the strong interface we have with our roster and, by extension, their clients."

It's this hands-on approach that has allowed Paranoid to better define the company's unique offering for agencies worldwide. Director Wilfrid Brimo's latest commercial for French premium television channel Canal Plus exemplifies this approach. The commercial was created to promote Carlos, a new series about the international Marxist terrorist who held the world ransom from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Working with agency BETC Euro RSCG, Brimo staged an ambitious reenactment of a car-bomb explosion in Paris that left one dead and 63 wounded in the early '80s. Brimo decided to film the car explosion with a Vision Research Phantom Gold camera attached to a motion-control rig, all shot in one continuous take, moving away from the blast at rocket speed.

The Milo precision motion-control rig was chosen primarily for its flexibility and strength under duress. Among its many capabilities, the Milo is designed to take the camera from below the ground to over 13 feet in height in one swift motion.

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